For 400 years, Taiwanese have been subject to foreign colonizers -- first the Dutch and Spanish, then the Manchu Empire, then the Japanese empire and finally the "Republic of China" KMT Chinese Nationalist Regime of Chiang Kai-shek and his son. In particular the last 100 years of first Japanese then KMT rule were brutal in attempted obliteration of Taiwan's Identity. Herein is chronicled the fight for its recovery.

Friday, December 28, 2012

What can such a mistress do but attempt to maintain some point of attractiveness to lessen the blows of abuse?

When people in power in a nation do not have a close love and identity with that nation, they will tend to destroy it. The Japanese occupation of Korea resulted in vast wholesale exploitation of Korean lands and resources, in effect stripping Korea bare for the war effort. Taiwan escaped such destruction because at that moment in history when its west coast was ceded to Japan by the Manchurian Empire, Japan wanted a colony to hold up to the Western colonial powers to show how it was on equal footing. So Taiwan was carefully managed and treated like a jewel of the Japanese empire. (However the Taiwanese people were still discriminated against and treated like second-class citizens.)

Not so for Taiwan under the fascist Leninist regime of the Chinese Nationalist Party, the KMT. Treated like Korea, it was stripped bare for the war effort. Paradoxically, the KMT regime was so corrupt that it quickly lost the war in China before it could completely destroy Taiwan. Left only with Taiwan, itself, the KMT was forced to somewhat identify with this land. They tried to remake it into an image of their own lost homeland. Even though making Taiwan a shabby copy of other lovers, the KMT dictators did want to keep some pretty places (and faces) to play.

Dictators also want power and money. And they need henchmen for that. And the henchmen also need power and money so that their loyalty to the dictator will be unshakeable. It was not enough to outright steal Taiwanese companies, businesses and factories that had been family owned for generations. It was not enough to steal Taiwanese retirement savings by the "quantitative easing" of the time: damn the inflation, print money full speed ahead. The KMT also went after poor farmers. So began the long arrangement of robbing farmers of their lands, rezoning them to become commercial property and making KMT cronies hefty profits.

Though it has not yet had a legislature that identifies with Taiwan, in the 1990's, finally Taiwan had a president who identified with Taiwan. And for another eight years until 2008, Taiwan had a imperfect reprieve of sorts from the rapacious lust for power and money.

But ever since the KMT won back the presidency, Taiwan has again become simply a resource to be exploited, a mistress to be used and then thrown out on the street when its usefulness and beauty have been completely degraded. What can such a mistress do but attempt to maintain some point of attractiveness to lessen the blows of abuse?

Can the Taiwanese people ever get the KMT to actually identify with Taiwan? Will there ever be a wedding ring rather than an offer of a pittance for prostitution and a swift kick out the door once an immediate lust is slaked?

Even an article such as this one can do little to shame the KMT into its obligations as an entity living off the people of Taiwan.

Following are some threats of new bruising and beatings on Taiwan that cannot be covered by clothing:

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

If you have seen the movie, Miss Potter, you will realize that after her phenomenal success in publishing children's books, Beatrix Potter used her wealth to buy up large tracts of farms in Cumbria (the Lake District) of northwest England in order to preserve them from developers who were buying the farms to subdivide them. She donated thousands of acres to a land trust to preserve them as working farms rather than allowing them to be developed. Often, the farmers and former owners were hired on as land and farm managers.

The natural beauty of Cumbria

Unfortunately, Taiwan has not had a wealthy person or trust with such a vision. For decades, the KMT dictatorship government used farm land as a cash cow by forcing farmers to sell their land at low prices and then when cronies bought the land, the government rezoned it for commercial or residential, thus allowing KMT government officials and cronies to make enormous profits on the deals.

I-Lan County looking southwest from Jī-ket (Er-jie)

Even now, when such deals are more scrutinized, the destruction of indiscriminate land urbanization continues. For example, in I-lan County, farmland diminishes rapidly as wealthy people buy it for their weekend residences. Even with land restrictions, they will buy a plot, build a small building that meets the land use restrictions, get a government inspector to come and issue the permit for that small building. Then after all the paperwork is done, they will build a massive add-on to the building that triples or quadruples the size, thus ending up with mansion that would never have been originally allowed on the land zoned for farming.

An encouraging contrast can be found in a Taiwan News report of one man who used his wealth and corporate earnings for land preservation. Fortunately his vision also includes the preservation of tree species and mountain and hillsides from erosion and mudslides. Unfortunately, no one else has followed his example and done similar things in the flatlands which developers so hungrily crave in hopes of massive profits. Even with the so much real estate empty in Taipei, developers continue to build in the hopes that one day they will get rich Chinese to come into Taiwan to buy their expensively priced apartments. No concern meanwhile has been shown for Taiwanese who are increasingly squeezed out of these artificially inflated real estate prices. Furthermore, many in Taiwan seemed more concerned for short term profits rather than the long-term health and sovereignty of Taiwan.

Lai Pei-yuan’s interest in trees started out simply enough. Originally engaged in a shipping firm operated by his family, he happened at one time to buy a modest piece of land from a friend. As things happened, he gradually became attached to the land and started acquiring more parcels in the Da-xue-shan (Big Snow Mountain) area of central Taiwan. Now 26 years after he acquired his first patch of soil he has spent billions of NT dollars acquiring public land for orchards and forests and finds himself bearing the title of “King of the Trees” and dubbed “Lai-sang” – a combination of his surname Lai and the Chinese name for Tarzan – by his friends and associates.

"He adds that the numbers don’t mean anything to him – meaning that how much he has spent acquiring the land and planting trees is not important. He says the most important thing is that he has been able to do all this for the good of the people of Taiwan."

As Lai’s son Lai Chien-chung tells it, the elder Lai’s family – including himself – were a little leery of Lai’s motives in taking up forestry and fruit farming, but eventually they came around and now offer their full support for his efforts to grow trees and fruit. Lai Chien-chung says that in the beginning his father would purchase fruit orchards, then pare them back and plant various species of trees including Taiwan camphor, Taiwan incense cedar and black pines. After 26 years of buying land and re-planting hillsides Lai Pei-yuan estimates that he has planted over 200,000 trees and converted nearly 100 hectares of orchards into lush forests.

While Lai’s family members were not quite sure of their father’s motives in the beginning, they still were willing to get their hands dirty and could often be found digging up grass and planting saplings on the sides of mountains. They also learned to love the land, and Lai Chien-chung took the initiative in planting coffee trees among the other species of trees.

Lai-sang’s motive in planting saplings was not so that he could harvest the grown trees for lumber. He simply wanted to cover barren hillsides with healthy, green forests. Everyone around him was curious as to what kind of fool he might be, giving up his home and family to go off into the mountains by himself and plant trees.

For the first few years after Lai bought his first parcels of land he would set off early in the morning with a couple of helpers to prepare the soil, lay down water pipes and plant trees, often coming home long after the sun had gone down behind the mountains. Luckily his family was very understanding and accommodating as he paid out funds for what many saw as useless tracts of wilderness. And Lai’s stubborn perseverance eventually moved the rest of the family to pitch in and join him in the mountains, planting trees and pulling up unwanted plants and weeds on the slopes.

Lai continued acquiring land and planting trees and now claims to have more than 200,000 trees on his property. He estimates that the total cost of acquiring the orchards and land, purchasing saplings for planting and paying workers to assist in working the land at nearly NT$1.5 billion.

The chairman of Ta-ay Freight and Cloud Road International Co., Ltd., Lai Pei-yuan always longed to go into the mountains as a young man, and it was in the mountainous area of central Taiwan that he finally came upon his ‘heaven on earth’. He admits that in the beginning he was largely ignorant of environmental protection. For some time he entertained the idea of reclaiming land to grow alpine vegetables, but after witnessing time and again how Taiwan's mountains and forests were being ravaged by the construction of roads and planting of orchards with their attendant need for pesticides that were often misused he began to revamp his view of the mountains and forests. He saw how the torrential rains brought by typhoons would trigger mudslides and flooding and realized that what this little place called Taiwan needed was the concept of "planting trees and returning to Nature".

Over the years Lai has never taken advantages of subsidies offered by the government for forestation efforts. Instead he has lavished his attention on each of his precious trees, taking good care of them without any need for pesticides or other chemicals. He claims a survival rate of 98% for his trees and points out that officers from the Forestry Bureau often turn to him for advice on techniques for planting trees.
read more...

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

When Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖), the director of Cape No. 7 and Seediq Bale, heard of a Chiayi high school baseball team that “almost” won the all-Japan Koshien summer tournament in Kobe in 1931, he just knew he had to make a movie about it. So he wrote a script, signed on as producer, asked Umin Boya to direct it, raised a pile of money, hired a cast of Taiwanese actors and extras, and the film, currently in production in Chiayi and other cities, is set to be released in early 2014.

The movie’s working title is “Kano,” the nickname of the old Chiayi Agricultural and Forestry Vocational High School, which no longer exists. The nickname comes from the first two English letters of the two Japanese words “Ka-gi No-rin,” with ‘Kagi’’ being the Japanese word for Chiayi and ‘’No-rin’’ being the Japanese term for agriculture and forestry.

“From time to time, Japanese tourists will stop here,” says Yu Guei-in (余佳蓁), a senior at National Chiayi University (NCYU), who works part-time as a secretary at the museum.

“Last summer, a Japanese reporter from the Sankei Shimbun newspaper came here to look around and ask us some questions about the movie, and three French tourists stopped by in August while visiting the city’s temples,” Yu says.

While most people in Chiayi know about the team’s exploits in 1931, few are aware that just a few steps from the modern 15-story glass-paneled city hall there is an old one-story Japanese-era building, hidden behind a long cement wall, that serves as an informal Kano museum for the team.

The building, still sporting sweet-smelling tatami mats and sliding paper doors in the Japanese style, houses the offices of the Kano Alumni Association. Supported by the city and a local university, it has a volunteer staff and is open Monday to Friday for tourists, scholars and history buffs. It’s a quiet place now, but once the movie is released, it could get crowded.

Inside the wooden structure, built in the 1920s, there is a library with dozens of copies of the Kano Alumni Association annual magazine, still published in Chinese by National Chiayi University (MCYU), and hundreds of old black-and-white photographs of the 1931 baseball squad. Outside in the courtyard there’s even a statue of one of the original team’s players holding up a bat and seemingly still ready to play ball.

Tourism opportunity

The Chiayi city government sees an opportunity in the 2014 release of the Wei-produced movie, which is said to be a cross between a baseball drama and a love story. Yes, Wei wrote a young woman into the script, and she’ll be the love interest of one of the players. So with expectations high that the movie will attract tourists from across Taiwan and Japan in the future, the city government’s tourism department donated a nice chunk of change — NT$500,000 — to help fund the movie.

Nearby, National Chung Cheng University, just a 30-minute bus ride from Chiayi, is planning to set up a tourist attraction based on the movie, since some of the action scenes will be filmed at Chung Cheng University.

According to Angel Chen (陳廷萱), a graduate student working on her master’s degree in marketing, the movie’s connection to Chiayi and Taiwan’s history during the Japanese Colonial Period (1895-1945) offers a “perfect storm” of public relations and tourism opportunities for all those involved in the movie’s production. [read more...]

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Only the story titles are in the original Austronesian languages. You will note the same problem -- they do not capitalize or make complete sentences with the Austronesian languages so as if to say it cannot be written in complete sentences but only the sounds represented.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

However, it is the influence of Mandarin Chinese that poses the greatest threat to her endangered mother tongue, Liao says

A 50-minute Aboriginal language class a week, often taught by a non-native speaker, is ineffective, argues Yuki

...

Liao Hui-ling, 37, one of Orchid Island’s only nurses and a member of the indigenous Tao (達悟族) people (known also as the Yami, 雅美族), is sensitive about the loss of her mother tongue.

“Without my language it’s like I don’t have water, and I’m thirsty,” Liao says.
Liao Hui-ling is just one of three names the married mother of two uses in daily life. To her parents she remains Sinan Matopush, her Aboriginal name. At work she uses her Chinese name and when dealing with the dozens of curious English-speaking tourists she hosts every year on the island, she uses the moniker Teresa. It is a multilingual existence that Liao leads — like many of her compatriots — but it comes at a cost.

“I can speak my own language, but I can’t speak it well. My English is better than my Yami,” concedes Liao.----

However, it is the influence of Mandarin Chinese that poses the greatest threat to her endangered mother tongue, Liao says.

“When kids go to school they learn Chinese. When they study books it’s in Chinese. When they deal with the government it’s in Chinese. How can my language continue to the next generation like this?” she says.

Critically endangered languages

In fact, in Taiwan today all the country’s Aboriginal languages are facing grave threats to their future survival. Many of the spoken forms of the 14 recognized indigenous groups — whose languages and dialects gave birth to the collection of Austronesian languages that are now spoken worldwide by about 300 million people — are at a point of almost total collapse.

When the UN’s global cultural arm UNESCO undertook an evaluation of 24 Taiwanese Aboriginal languages in 2009, it found that nine of them were already extinct. Particularly hard hit are those communities located on the nation’s west coast, including Siraya and Babuza. A further six languages — including Kavalan which is spoken in and around Hualien County and Thao which heralds from Nantou County — are critically endangered. In some cases only dozens of speakers remain.

Even Amis, Puyuma and Paiwan — numerically some of the stronger Aboriginal languages — are struggling and are now listed by the UN body as vulnerable.

language of identity

“There is an idea of a person’s identity and ethnicity in their language,” says Truku-speaking Apay Yuki who is a member of the Taroko tribe. “If you don’t speak it then you don’t know who you are … Language contributes to a person’s identity.”
Yuki, an assistant professor with the Department of Indigenous Languages at National Dong Hwa University (國立東華大學), recently returned to her native homeland to carry out research into the health of her mother tongue. The findings, she says, are distressing.

“You could see that the younger group are showing serious and ongoing language attrition and the local language is being seriously damaged. When people who speak Taroko fluently, generally those aged above 50, are gone then the language is gone,” she says.

Yuki says that the loss of Aboriginal lands combined with years of repression — both at the hands of acquisitive Han Chinese settlers, colonial Japanese forces and the punitive period of Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) Martial Law era — enacted a terrible toll on indigenous people as a result of which “social structures were changed.”
However, she argues, while the oppression continues to haunt Aboriginal peoples, today’s linguistic threats are different. Waves of migration to cities away from traditional Aboriginal language strongholds as younger people search out work, coupled with a loss of value attached to local tongues, are dealing a double blow to already weakened languages.

Yuki adds that government policy has consistently failed to make the teaching of Aboriginal languages a priority. A 50-minute Aboriginal language class a week, often taught by a non-native speaker, is ineffective, argues Yuki, who also questions how resources are being used.

“There is [government] funding, but I’m not sure how effective it is. The money is a waste … The first thing to do is to really dig out the root problem about why people are not re-learning their languages.”

Bottom up approach

Yuki argues that a “bottom up” approach would improve the re-learning of local languages and says the benefits of speaking the language of your elders is immensely rewarding.

“We are now trying to convey to parents how important it is to speak our languages and what cognitive benefits it brings. Personally, after re-learning my language, I feel — as a family — we are closer, I feel a sense of belonging. I’m proud of being Taroko, it’s an affirmation.”

The person charged with shaping and implementing government policy on Aboriginal languages is Ciou Wun-long (邱文隆), an official at the Council of Indigenous Peoples. The 40-year-old Bunun tribe member, who has headed the department’s Language Section for five years, says reviving Taiwan’s 42 Aboriginal languages and dialects is a “formidable” task.

Ciou cites the 60-year-long ban on local languages, and today’s multi-racial society where there are “limited places where indigenous languages can be spoken,” as key factors explaining the demise of Aboriginal languages.

However, he maintains “there is still hope,” and cites the council’s 2001 Aboriginal Language Skill Certification Examination as a bureaucratic achievement designed to arrest the slide toward extinction.

“In addition to the language proficiency test, Aboriginal dialects have also been included into the school curriculum … [which] has also helped relevant teaching materials come into being, and has helped to cultivate teachers of Aboriginal languages,” Ciou says.

However, Ciou concedes that with the number of programs the council is endeavoring to push ahead, government resources are insufficient. “The government only allocates an annual budget of between NT$110 million and NT$120 million into language revitalization, an amount that is inadequate to fund the works the council has been doing,” Ciou said.

By contrast, the government spent over NT$215 million on a two-night rock musical to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Republic of China.

One uses bó͘, "certain; particular," to particularize a mountain without specifically naming which one. Notice that in English the word "certain" has a broader range of meanings whereas Taiwanese uses distinct words.

• Unfortunately, because the R.O.C. government-in-exile suppresses the use of Taiwanese and other non-Mandarin languages in public schools in Taiwan, there is not much opportunity to learn the vocabulary of the non-Mandarin languages associated with an academic setting. Furthermore, few essay or papers in these languages have ever been written by students. The normal editing processes are never experienced. The following Taiwanese expressions describe editing practices.

* Underline this sentence = "kā chit kú ê ē-bīn oē sûn"

oē = draw ; sûn = line ; ē-bīn = underneath

[Notice the homonym: the noun oē 話 in "kú-oē" meaning speech/word and the verb oē 畫 meaning draw/sketch. These two homonyms are obviously different in their Han characters. But actually in the romanization, one has very little trouble differentiating them because of their distinct parts of speech and the noun often being associated in a compound word and the verb often being associated with an object -- e.g. kú-oē "sentence" vs. oē tô͘ "draw a picture" ]

Kho͘ is a verb that means "to circle" ; kho͘-á is the noun that means "a circle" -- just as in English one can say: "Circle this sentence." or "Circle a circle around this sentence." Or to get more fancy you could translate it as "Circumscribe a circle..."

* If the word or phrase is really poorly written, sometimes you should just strike it out. Taiwanese is quite vivid in the way to say that. Jack-the-Ripper fashion, literally, you say "kill/murder/slash that sentence!" = "Kā hit kú-oē thâi-tiāu." or "murder that word..." = "Kā hit jī thâi-tiāu." This word "thâi," meaning kill/murder/slash w/knife, is also what someone who is good at bargaining can do: Kā i thâi kè-siàu. "Cut/kill the price."

• Poa̍h-kiáu 賭博 means "gambling." In the fall of 2009 there was a referendum being held in Phêⁿ-ô͘ (Penghu or the Pescadores) on whether or not to allow gambling casinos ( kiáu-keng ). Unfortunately, gambling profits are often controlled by organized crime ( o͘-siā-hōe ) and corrupt government officials ( tham-ù ê chèng-hú ). Where you find casinos you also find drugs ( to̍k-phín ), violence ( po̍k-le̍k ), sexual crimes ( sek-chêng ), and human trafficking ( jîn-kháu ê bé-bē) where the victims are controlled with drugs ( iōng to̍k-phín khòng-chè in ). A few people or mafia organizations can make huge profits off gambling, but for most residents, there is no benefit ( hó-chhù ) but rather an accumulation of societal problems -- particularly addiction in its various forms.

· Taiwanese still has the saying with variations that basically translate as "An Austronesian Grandmother and a Hoklo Grandfather" --- For example,

"Ū tn̂g soaⁿ-kong, bô Tn̂g-soaⁿ-má." -- "Have a Han grandfather, but no Han grandmother..." With that intermarriage of Austronesian and Han that makes up today's Taiwanese people, I thought it would be interesting to share some marriage and kinship related terms:

Chheⁿ-ḿ 生姆 or originally written 青姆 means a son or daughter's mother-in-law. Mandarin uses a different word: 親家母

This expression "teh ùn tāu-iû" is used in social circumstances to describe very short visits. If someone "drops by" and then leaves, it is like dipping food in soy sauce.

This expression is also very appropriate to describe the attitude of the Chinese Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek's regime. They treated Taiwan as a temporary place from which they would fight back to China. They spoke of winning back China within three years after fleeing as refugees to Taiwan in 1949. So you can notice today that all the beautiful architecture is mainly from the Japanese era (pre-1945). The KMT regime put up many hasty structures, allowed squatter shack communities of former soldiers to take over many of the parks in the cities, and generally allow industry to heavily pollute the environment and degrade the landscape because they thought of Taiwan mainly as a resource to be exploited before heading back to China.

These two words are what the colonialist KMT Chinese Nationalist Party and the Japanese empire before them in Taiwan did in an attempt to destroy Taiwan's native languages.

• "developed baby fat from nursing" hàng-leng

When a nursing infant grows well with lots of fat rolls, one does not call the infant the common words for "fat" such as pûi-ê or tōa-kho͘-ê. Taiwanese has this special word hàng-leng for "baby fat." If you say that about a baby, the mother will be very delighted to receive the complement. Incidentally, the word tōa-kho͘ literally means "large circumference" and kho͘ specifically refers to the metal bands that circle around the old wooden buckets and hold the pieces of wood together. (Or think of whiskey barrels.)

In Taiwan, you can still sometimes bargain for things you buy. But unlike Thailand, it is usually pretty standardized so that people are not automatically marking up the price 400 percent because you are a foreigner. So even if you do not bargain, you can get a decent price in Taiwan.